What do Minnesota, Wisconsin, Utah, and Arkansas all have in common? If you said “None of those teams are in the 2013 NCAA Men’s Final Four,” you wouldn’t be wrong this year, though you also wouldn’t be correct – at least within the boundaries of our topic for today.
If your answer was, “All four states have experienced massive oil spills within the last year – and three within the last two weeks,” you’d be correct, unfortunately.
The latest disaster this weekend saw thousands of barrels of thick tar sands oil spewing from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline into a residential neighborhood in central Arkansas. Twenty-two homes had to be evacuated, in a spill that literally saw oil running down residential streets and between houses. Take a look…
Of course, since it was a holiday weekend, smack-dab in the middle of Congress’ latest two-week vacation, it was nearly impossible to find a politician of any kind with something serious to say about the latest disaster. That doesn’t surprise us, since politicians of all kinds have been slipping and dancing around the issues of oil and environmental safety for far too many years now.
For all the work the Obama Administration has done on environmental issues — like requiring much better fuel standards for cars and trucks, or clamping down on emissions — the fact of the matter is, none of that will matter if President Obama and other politicians don’t stop the Keystone XL pipeline route through Nebraska and all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.
No matter what the decision is on the Keystone pipeline, the most important liquid flowing through Nebraska over the next hundred years won’t be oil — something a task force in the Nebraska Legislature made very clear last week…
As reporter JoAnne Young noted, Nebraska state Sen. Tom Carlson, in a meeting of the Legislature’s Natural Resources Committee last week, talked about what could happen if America ever runs out of affordable gas, coal, or oil. “We will survive,” he said.
However, if Nebraskans ever lose access to our amazing surplus of clean, drinkable, useable water? “We will die,” said Carlson.
For all the bluster already flooding the media from the oil companies about how many trucks they sent to Arkansas to suck up the tar sands sludge from the neighborhood, or how well the cleanup is going from the recent spill in Minnesota, the facts remain the same. No matter how much cleanup is done in either location, the raw, sludgy tar sands oil has now damaged both areas where the spills have occurred, in ways that neither area will fully recover from for many years to come.
No matter how many short-term temporary jobs the Keystone XL pipeline will generate, all it takes is one spill, once, in any area over the Ogallala Aquifer, and ALL the jobs in a county or a region could be lost, because the water may no longer be suitable for irrigating crops or slaking the thirst of Nebraska residents.
Just one spill could do exactly what state Sen. Carlson fears, and kill off a large area of Nebraska, Kansas, or anywhere else along the long path of the pipeline, as water is turned from a lifeline into worthless poison.
If you don’t think the price is too high for that kind of oil — oil Americans will never see, as it will be shipped to foreign ports and sold abroad — ask yourself these questions:
If you lived in the neighborhood of an oil spill, how safe would you feel drinking the water from your well? How safe would you feel letting your kids play outside? What price would you pay to never have to see crude oil flooding the streets of your neighborhood?
These are kinds of questions our politicians from both parties are slipping on right now.
From our perspective, the right answers don’t really seem that slick. Then again, we’re not financed by oil company lobbyists.
UPDATE:
[Hat-tip Chris Tackett at TreeHugger.]
Cross-published at The Daily Felltoon…
Shawn “Smith” Peirce is a nationally syndicated radio producer, writer, editor, and journalist, currently working with Randi Rhodes. He also works with nationally syndicated political cartoonist Paul Fell on The Daily Felltoon. Follow him on Twitter: @_silversmith.
Thus continuing Obama’s perfect record of associating the Democratic Party with dirty energy projects right before major environmental disasters. He did it with deep water drilling, nuclear power, and now oil pipelines.
The intriguing feature of the Exxon oil spill is not just the above ground flow depicted in the video but what impact that oil has after it flows into the drainage opening at the end of the street.
No doubt oil is being mixed with sewage, and what you cannot see in the video is what impact that might have on downstream sewage treatment.
Wind farms are also an environmental disaster. The wind farm corporations hire scientists to give them the reports that they want, then publish as fact. Then the corporations share the cost of their reports. cohoctonwindwatch under the anti trust suit.
Just like election fraud, the wind farm fraud has to be researched a little..not just believing MSM.cohoctonwindwatch and windaction.org are two good sites.
Unfortunately the wind farm fraud seems to be a democratic baby.
That’s hilarious sarcasm, Molly! You must be kidding, because it’s hard to believe anyone could look at the photos and video of the actual environmental disaster going on right now with the Exxon Arkansas tar sands pipeline spill — and all the other oil spills, water pollution and air pollution that actually hurt people (and kill them with pollution), not to mention the looming risk of climate catastrophe — and think that is somehow comparable or even preferable to the relatively mild environmental impacts of wind farms.
There’s no comparison — at least in any sane conversation based on actual scientific evidence. Of course there are impacts, but the impacts are not equal.
I always ask you Molly, every time you post here against clean wind energy, and you never answer: How much is a stable climate worth to you?
You don’t mention the word “Canada” in your article but include it among tags. I’m as surprised how as few folks saw this coming as they did offshore oil drilling spills.
The nuclear industry has its share of disasters, Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island.
The oil industry has not only had its share of explosions and massive oil spills, like BP’s Deepwater Horizon, but was responsible for what the documentary film Crude: The Real Price of Oil described as the “Amazon Chernobyl” after Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, “spent three decades systematically contaminating one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth,” creating “a ‘death zone’ in an area the size of Rhode Island, resulting in increased rates of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, and other health ailments.”
So, Molly, my question is: Can you point to a single analogous disaster occurring as the result of a wind farm?
What’s next, Molly? Exploding solar panels?
Get real!
Unfortunately wind farms don’t create a lot of electricity, they’re completely dependent on outside factors (favorable wind speed), and therefore are not very profitable. Which leads to the single biggest obstacles in creating significant amounts of wind energy: lawsuits from “not in my backyard” types and environmentalists, and the threat of fines due to wildlife fatalities. Still, wind farms are in the planning stages in many parts of California. There was an eagle killed at a wind farm recently, I think Missouri, and the owner faces a stiff fine. How that plays out, and the reemergence of the California Condors effect on wind energy, will help to determine how the industry moves forward. We could power a lot of California with wind energy but the actual percentage is very small. And the impact of wind turbines on people is overrated IMO.
Steve #7, just a reminder that all electricity generation is dependent on “outside factors”: coal plants, for example, require destructive mining that kills coal miners and pollutes the air, soil, water and fish we eat with mercury, delivered by trains, while nuke plants require grid electricity and cold river/ocean water (that also kills fish) to keep from melting down and causing a regional disaster… to name just two.
Don’t conflate the current contribution of wind power to the US energy mix with the potential for wind energy to ramp up to be a major source of energy for the country. Other countries like Denmark and Germany are dealing with those ‘outside factors’ just fine, thank you very much, and are using smart energy management with steady investment to ramp up the share of electricity generated by clean, non-polluting wind energy. Bill Gates is investing in grid battery storage research that will solve the intermittency issue.
So there’s really much more going on in the future takeover of renewable clean energy world than you may realize. At least Citigroup energy analysts think so.
It’s also odd to emphasize the impacts of wind turbines on wildlife without acknowledging the far more devastating impact on wildlife from our regular everyday conventional electricity generation, and the outsized impacts from related catastrophes. For example, the untold numbers of wildlife killed in the BP Oil Spill, or toxic mercury contamination in fish, and fish kills that are part of the daily operation of nuke plant intake pumps on rivers. Wind and solar aren’t perfect, but those impacts would not happen with a solar spill or a wind spill. Cats kills more birds and wildlife than wind farms.
That said, wind farms must be properly sited to minimize impacts on wildlife.
Desi, I’m well aware that all power generators are dependent on outside sources. There’s a cogen plant in Inyo county which provides 108 MW daily to California. Imagine if they went to work in the morning and the fuel supply just stopped… because that’s what can happen with wind and you can’t just restart the wind supply. That’s what I was talking about, outside factors beyond control. Sorry I wasn’t clearer on that.
Sorry, but comparing Denmark to the USA is like comparing apples to oranges. We have 15 times the wind energy capacity that Denmark has (and more than double German capacity for that matter). If we only had to provide power for 5 million people, roughly 1/3 the population of the L.A. metroploitan area we could easily
do so.
Yes, there are consequences to wildlife with oil and coal. The rewards likely outweigh the risks to those involved in that profitable business which I think is abhorrent. In a far less profitable endeavor (wind energy) the cost of litigation, and the potential costs in wildlife fatalities, may make some investors think twice.